Chapter . On Drinking Virtual Wine and the Grounding of Belief
We understand media as reality. We interact, emotionally, with another avatar as we do with another real person. And for some people an avatar is a more convincing reality than a real person
In 1996 Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, two Stanford University professors, wrote a book called The Media Equation. The media equation, simply put, is an equals sign: Media experiences equal real-life experiences. They argued that this is true not just for interactive media, but for all media. After years of research and hundreds of interviews, their core argument was that people assume what they see in media is reality because evolution never demanded our brains do otherwise. Our media has out-evolved ...
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